Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 3))

one which is faultlessly drawn and colored with all due observations of
precise and pedantic realities.
What does it matter if the rigging in Boudin’spicture is nautically
incorrect, if he gives his masts one yard too many or too little, as long as he
suggests the peculiar charm and restlessness of seafaring vessels. He
probably knows every stay and spar, but he feels that the eye of the
spectator would be more satisfied with a few vital dashes than an accurate
illustration. Also in the sky-line we notice many strokes and patches
which do not resemble facts in accordance with the laws of perspective and
the conventionalities of domestic architecture, but do they not as a whole
give the impression of a little French harbor town, with its faint suggestion
of the heavy ocean, of home-coming vessels and mutinous skies?
Pictures like these the gum-workers should study in order to learn to
eliminate facts and at the same time to subordinate the daubs and dashes
which accomplish it, to the greater elements of composition, of proportion,
and of dark and light. It would surely do no harm to cultivate that
extraordinary acuteness of vision, which enables Monet and Whistler (the
one in the prismatic colors of the rainbow and the other in grays and
browns) to distinguish in one note of color twenty oppositions or more,
each influencing the other by their tonal juxtaposition, like so many notes
of music.
But may not too many inaccuracies be added at the expense of the
general truth? Undoubtedly, nothing is more frequent with unskilful
artists than to lose the swing of a line by separately accentuating particular
indentations, or the character of a mass by over-modeling subordinate
saliences. Any distraction of attention from the essential elements of a
picture is apt to destroy the dignity and breadth of its view.
One must be a past-master of structural form before one can subor-
dinate the means employed for an artistic attainment to the attainment itself.
A technique affecting haphazard effects, misrepresenting natural vision and
often merely clothing bad construction and other technical shortcomings, is
affectation and foppery. Expression can not exist without character as its
stamina, and character and stamina can be only given by those who feel them.
There is no set and definite mode of acquiring such faculties. It must
be intuition, and as in the case of the artist’s own affections, inspirations,
and ideals, the result and the expression of his own spontaneous spirit and
individuality. Thus, alone, it will have flavor, freshness, and suggestion.
SlDNEY ALLAN.